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I spent an hour or so with Kevin, MOKHZ last saturday getting a brief lesson on SMD soldering and I’m a bit more confident now about how to put the softrock together. Now all but the iron tip has arrived so as soon as that turns up I’ll be starting the project properly.

So far I’ve borrowed a very nice microscope from a friend who’s into beekeeping and he used it for a bit of bee pathology. It’s way more than I need but useful none the less to use this is much better than to struggle with nothing. New flux pen, solder 3rd hand (although Kevin did suggest that blu tack works just as well and judging by the quality of the boards he showed me it works very well). Kevin also introduced me to some best practice and it was a really useful time. So thanks kevin and I’ll be on S22 when I hit a problem!

Hopefully the rest of the Farnell order will turn up today so i can start putting things together

Whilst I was there Kevin showed me his HPSDR and his Quicksilver receiver and they are simply amazing. maybe one day I’ll be building one myself. First things first lets do the softrock!

The CMOS chip is due to arrive soon so i’ll have a complete kit ready for my blundering soldering skills to knacker up. I’ve done a bit of research as to the best way to solder some of these tiny little monsters and I think it’ll be a bit of achallenge to get them all to work as intended and look pretty.

So the goal for this kit is to solder it so it works and not to make it look pretty!

Now that I’m back into the land of semi normality and that sleep is now a thing of the past my HF Lite arrived a few days ago and I’ve had a good look through the parts and I think that I may have bitten quite a big chunk for my first home brew project

After seeking a bit of advice on how to solder the SMD’s I’ve got a few choice as to how I get the components on the board and get them soldered. One thing for sure is that it ain’t going to be a pretty build. I’ll be starting on the build at the weekend and I’ll be posting the progress and without sounding too negatives some of the problems that I encounter.

A few useful links though

SDR official website

Softrock Yahoo Group

Build instructions

Searching through the emails?I receive during the day can sometimes be a bit of a chore. Other times some really useful informations comes to light. The softrock yahoo group has the latest news on the various softrock product but now they’ve annouced that the v9.0 if the HF lite has been released. the official softrock radio website has information on how to purchase the kits.

The beacon station uses an old Toshiba laptop and whilst it is likely that the power consumption isn’t that high (I really ought to measure it) the combination of the rig, two PSU’s and the laptop must make a healthy drain on the supply over a year.

Part of the SDR beacon station project is to develop a low power consumption unit so that the impact it has is fairly small. A number of options have been looked at in the last few weeks ranging from various netbooks (Eeepc 701 and it’s followers) as well as nano and pico itx systems. But the unit that caught my eye was the Fit-PC. Claiming a 3-5W drain and wifi really looks like a potential for low or even off grid monitoring. The units are fairly pricy so depending on the success of the SDR lite project the hole station can be put into a small box